Heiron used to be part of Thermopolis approximately 40 years ago. It was a shantytown, where Thermopolis’ poor lived. It was shut down and evacuated as unsafe, and sure enough, the next windstorm saw it swept away into the Necklace.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t evacuated very well. Three Rasi families were still hiding in the structure when it went overboard in the storm, and their descendants inhabit it still. The Rasi-made gravitics are weak and wobbly, supplied by salvaged solar panels that used to power billboards, but there’s enough there to live. The inhabitants catch and eat wildlife, and forage for windblown plants that have lodged in the structure.

Life in Heiron is dangerous and precarious. The three families - the Jongs, the Akefs, and the Gardners - vie for supremacy amid the ruins, kidnapping members of the other families for breeding when possible, and inbreeding when it is not. While legal incest is not normally a Rasi custom, in the breakdown of society in Heiron after the storm, it has become a recognized necessity.

Each of the families have about thirty members, frequent births more than making up for the frequent deaths, though two generations of inbreeding has fixed certain undesirable recessives in all three families. Repair of the all important gravitic grids and their power sources are about the only reason for truces.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Alpha playtesting is done in-house, by a group of people who do a lot of playtesting, and under a GM who knows the intent of the rules completely, preferably the designer. The playtesters are encouraged to do strange and exotic combos, max up rarely taken powers and skills, completely overbalance their characters, and generally be supreme rules lawyers, for the purpose of destroying the game. The GM has to make mid-game rules corrections as problems come to light to fix the game. Alpha testing should be performed for as many variations as possible. Rules changes are incorporated back into the playtest package ASAP to ensure a fast iterative cycle. In short, alpha tests the rules.

Beta playtests are performed exclusively out of house, with GMs and players unfamiliar with the game, as if they bought it cold at the store. Their purpose is to replicate the experience of a customer experiencing the product with no experience of the game at all, AND TO SEND FEEDBACK ON THAT EXPERIENCE BACK TO THE CREATIVE TEAM! (Emphasized for the 75 to 80% of beta testers who do not send a word back!) What they are testing is the way the rules are written - are they clear and concise? Do they confuse more than explain? Are they too long? Too short? Is play turgid? confusing? boring? fun? - etc. In short, Beta tests the expression of the rules.

Ideally, the package sent to the beta testers is fundamentally sound mechanically - that's the Alpha team's job - and problems with play should only occur due to poor choice of words. Unfortunately, the ideal is never completely reached, but it should be damned close.

As for the high proportion of Beta testers never sending back feedback, this is due to a lot of reasons. The best is that REAL LIFE just stepped in and flattened you. That happens, and there's nothing anyone can do. The worst reason is the tester didn't want to hurt the designer's feelings - Hey! That's why it was sent to you! I want that kind of hurt! I'd rather that hurt than the one where paying customers have problems!

A big problem is you can't just use the same good Beta Testers - the ones that give you good feedback - for every game. Beta testers get used to the way you write, and can guess what you mean. You don't want them to do that, as that shortcuts the whole reason for Beta testing! So a designer is always frantically searching for Beta testers, and praying that this one will be one of the few, the proud, the responders!﻿

We started playtesting The Necklace Saturday. This is an alpha playtest - we are testing the rules, not the expression of the rules. The session was mostly creating the company and characters, but we had time enough to play out a bit of game in character by the time we had finished.

We decided to make a troupe of actors traveling in a showboat around the Necklace, presenting shows to customers - and doing a bit of larceny on the side. The PC actors were a Carnivale actor/acrobat, a Javan acrobat/ dancer, a brace of Puck brothers, both magician/puppeteers, and a Rasi singer/actress.

The Impresario who ran the showboat was named Harcourt Fenton - yes, after Harcourt Fenton Mudd! Fenton entered into the actors' lounge and informed them that their last show of the night before had finally paid for their deuterium fuel and docking fees at Araminta Station, the multi-cultural Trading Post they had been trapped at for a long time. They would be finally be able to leave, and perform a show for a new audience, one which hadn't seen their entire repertory already. After that, they could maybe be paid some of what was owed them.

The actors bitched. Fenton's shows were overblown and intellectual, they said. The Macbeth they played in the cat costumes was the worst. Fenton defended himself, accusing the actors of being incapable of understanding his, Fenton's, literary allusions and references. They hissed and booed, and called him a pretentious hack. Hotly, Fenton demanded they put up or shut up! Show him a better script, he said, and he would produce the play.

The two puppeteer brothers produced a script they had written. It was a comedy, and showed the lives of a troupe of poorly and irregularly played actors - with, coincidentally, the same names as they bore - forced to work under the whip of an overly-intellectual and pretentious windbag of an impresario, who made them play Macbeth dressed as cats.

Fenton took the play and scanned through it. At first he derided the script as entirely lacking such vital elements as an actual plot, but it really was very funny, so he decided to cast the play. Of course, he cast it with none of the actors playing themselves, as he thought them all wrong for the parts, and besides, he thought the audience would savor the meta humor inherent in the situation.

The actors told him where he could stick his meta humor, as the audience would just think it stupid. Fenton defended his decision, claiming that the audience were all fatuous baboons who wouldn't know real Art if it shat on their heads, but confronted with something they couldn't understand, would assign their confusion to Art, and think it deep and philosophical, and not just a comedy.

The actors agreed that the audience were indeed a bunch of baboons who wouldn't know Art if it shat on their heads, but held the position that they should therefore not bother presenting them with any actual art at all so tenaciously that Fenton eventually backed down, and allowed them to play themselves, though at their insistence, and on their head be it! He had gone to acting school, unlike this gang of ruffians, and knew what he was doing.

After he left, the actors began to plan a fond farewell mugging of the casino at the trading post - said plans consisting of "Hey! Let's rob the casino before we leave!" "Yeah! Awesome!"

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Altisherpas do not live in towns. They live in their city, THE city, built on, in, from, and around their Slowboat Achilles. When Altisherpas get their wanderlust on, which happens every so often, they find a congenial group that feels the same way, and go nomad - they borrow, buy, or lease an airship and head out into the Necklace. There, they find a place to settle for a while - a "camp" - and begin to work it; sowing food crops that will self seed and flourish in the wild, introducing animals they feel would benefit the place, tinkering a bit with genetics, shaping the land, experimenting with the native flora and fauna, and generally changing the place they have settled. After a while, when they agree they have finished, they move on to someplace else, or if they would rather, return to the city.

Altisherpan Outposts

Sometimes an Altisherpan company or institute of learning will sponsor an outpost, where a number of scientists and techs will observe something of interest for long periods of time. The outposts are airships fixed up with labs and stasis storage for specimens, so that when they are done, they can fly back to the city and leave little trace. Sometimes, for exceedingly interesting subjects, the outpost will be semi-permanent, a modified cargo container will house the labs, and the scientists will rotate in and out as required.﻿

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Ran another session of my 1980s ska band High Strung campaign Saturday. The band is hurting for certain! John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, the geezer sax player, caught the clap from a groupie, because he stopped wearing condoms when his bandmates kept poking holes in them. He's still out of a job and living in the band's practice space.
Rusty Trombone has quietly gotten hooked on booze, and is sliding down the slippery slope. The band finally got a gig at the best club in Detroit, and just when they started to play, there was a loud BANG! and the lights went out. A transformer blew out. This being Detroit in the 80s, there were shots in the dark club, people got trampled, and a couple people got shivved.
Lief and Wanda, guitarist and bass player, and both vocalists, grabbed their instruments and ran out the back. Doc Brown, the trumpet player, and John packed their instruments and headed off to loot some new instruments in the riot that was sure to - and did - follow. Each nabbed a new bit of brass - and lucky they did!
Rusty, the drummer, also went out to loot, but left his drum kit, which like all instruments, he was responsible for. The roadies left it on stage when they packed up the amps and mics, which were their responsibility. Rusty went by a liquor store and, figuring a drink would only make the looting more fun, smashed the window and crawled inside, where the cops found him, drunk and resisting arrest. Someone stole his drum kit, of course.
The band had to come up with his bail, so they sold their old instruments, flushed out savings, and generally called in favors to get the cash. When they got him out, they found out his kit had been stolen, so it was back to the junkyard! They found a cracked high hat , some drum hardware, and an old piano stool he could use as a throne. Rusty used his Repair skill to cobble a bass and snare out of the hardware and some large diameter pvc pipe. Hope is getting hard to come by!﻿

Klax and I worked a lot more on the Necklace last night, on setting generation tables. We came up with a sweet method to generate maps of the local area. Set a center point in the middle of apiece of paper. This is most likely a settlement of some kind, but could be anything - a wreck, an asteroid, some godforsaken mat on the River, whatever. It's Where You Are Now. Roll on the main table, take the result - say Rock in the River, meaning an asteroid that has been lodged in the river, making an island - and then roll 1d100. This tells you how far away from the center it is. Go along the river, up or downstream, and put in the a symbol for the rock and a note "Rock" and the distance, like "Rock (54)". Roll again and do the same thing - say "Jungle Ball (27)". Put a symbol for the Jungle Ball approximately 26 units away from the center, away from the River, floating in air. Continue until your local area map fills up to your satisfaction.

Now for each setting element, roll on the proper sub table. So, for "Rock (54)", roll on the Rock in the River table. You roll up a result of "Carnivale Settlement", then the size of the rock (large) the composition of the rock (Nickel-Iron), and the vegetation (forest). For settlements, there is a further sub-table appropriate to the culture (Carnivale) you can roll on to define things further. Say it turns out to be a Large Carnivale town, with a fishing fleet, river port, and mine. There's a cultural sub-table you can use to create the specific Carnivale culture - because Carnivale tech level is so low, each town or village can be wildly different from its neighbors.

The distances you roll are undefined, and you can define them. Travel time is a good way to define things, say the number of hours it takes to get there, and that would depend greatly on the method you use to travel. A fusion jet airship travels a lot faster than a riverboat, which travels a lot faster than a dugout canoe. You could also define the units as kilometers, or days of travel, or whatever. It's all relative.